, "".."'.".ú /':".., 'J'r'). ;:;;:/ø 84 gold or silver coin or bullion concealed for safekeeping. To qualifY, the booty must have been hidden long enough so that the owner is probably dead. In England, treasure trove went to the Crown; in the United States, founded in opposition to the Crown, the law was generally modi- fied into a "finders keepers" principle. Though Idaho had never had a re- corded treasure case, other state courts had tended to rule that mislaid prop- erty belongs to the owner of the prop- erty on which it was found, while lost or treasure-trove property belongs to the finder. But the definitions are charmingly indistinct. As Corliss's lawyer argued in his brie "The distinction between lost and mislaid property turns on the likeli- hood that the owner will return to retrieve the property. . . . If mislaid property is mislaid for long enough, it becomes lost." Everything in this precedent-setting dis- pute could depend on the judge's best guess about the identity and the intent of the original owner. Locals have speculated that the coins were buried by a whorehouse madam, by Chinese miners, by Basque shepherds, by Jesse James, or by the Sundance Kid. These are typecast fantasies rather than plausible theories: the nearest brothel was miles away, in Hailey; the Chinese had left the area by 1914 (the last date on any of the buried coins); the valley's Basques were very poor; Jesse James died in 1882; and the Sundance Kid died in 1911. The longtime owners of the Broad- ford property were not so colorfuL From 1890 to 1934, the property belonged to \ ' :: .... <;,.; :' .:-::W :. - r;, ,,' r' "':: "",L ,: ',< """.{"", 0, . ,\é't:.1' /' .' .;./1:":, :-:: .: ...... -':-:." . .}:.:'!-:" ,.. H1' :...." .' ';'.( './: 1: ' 1;;, , "{: ... the Peterlin family, Catholics who had immigrated from northern Italr There were four Peter 1in brothers, but census and cemetery records suggest that by 1914 only Charles and Gero1amo Peter- lin lived in the property's log cabin. They were reclusive bachelors, who farmed and worked in the Minnie Moore mine, where they were paid four dollars for a ten-hour day. Gerolamo died of pneu- monia in 1921, at the age of fifty-five, and Charles died in 1924, at sixty-seven, of "general disability:" The property fell to the other resident of the farm, a nephew of theirs named Anton F. Peter- 1in, known as Frank. Like his uncles, Frank Peterlin was a bachelor loner. Mike Ivie, a retired contractor, remembers Frank as a short, graying, husky man with a weak chin who kept eighty cows. He gave Ivie and other neighborhood kids honey from his api and loved to tease them with homespun magic tricks. Frank Peterlin had a wire-sided Dodge truck that started with a hand crank. On November 27, 1933, while he was cranking the truck, it plunged for- ward and crushed him to death against a fence. He was forty-nine and had no heirs. When the sheriff opened a pad- locked shed on the property; he was as- tonished to discover a cache of items that had been reported missing in the neigh- borhood: mining picks and shovels, chains from the county road scraper, splitting wedges from logging camps, a .30- .30 rifle stolen from a shepherd. "M- terward, we found out from the local store owners that Frank bought more ' " Jì. "........ ':':' ':r:::: ' :::: . .."":.:;. .::. .. :......::...:...::..:.. :. . ,::''':: ' ;H:: ::( i . " <<<<..... . :.;.:.: ..;- .". 0:;::;.;:;;.:. ;:: ,:N,:.<<, : ,....,'W"s'::.;. ;", y f : \ ' :''' :' ' ' ' : :, :.;" . .,: , ., . : " , ,,, : , :" , I,: ,."'"",,,JJ , ':'/ " 'þJ.* ,",' ',:'< "i.::,1}",:\\ \, C ''\':-,;:. :"' ' '''< ':"\[; ".;.:a ':'{:' :, < :r' """""<:,,.," " .;:.""" :;: V""' . .: L. ..)< . "S. ... .: *. .;-:.:::::::: '" . . =:--=-:-:=* :-:-.. ......... -....... ............................. ...... '1t\ ,.,$. .-:.'-;."S.::tJ:.'.::;.... < ,.'i' ; .:- ;; ;:.. : ;; .y. ............ k MUj "Boy, I'd love to meet you sometime oJ! leash. " THE NEW YORKER, MAY 31. 1999 flashlight batteries than anyone in the county;" Ivie says. "It was for his night work-he was the slickest thief in the area, and no one had ever suspected it." Frank Peterlin also had a huge jar filled with a hundred dollars' worth of pen- nies in his house. He sounds like just the sort of person who might lay his hands on-and then bury-a jar of gold. B ACK in Sun Valley after the "Bill Gates" road trip, Greg Corliss says, he found himself thinking, I'm getting eight dollars an hour spraying down the inside of dump trucks and hauling snow all night. It's hard work. Emily and I are fighting all the time about whether I should trust Larry. Why don't we just split the gold? One night, as he and An- derson were out riding around, Corliss initiated another of their dump-truck di- alogues. Anderson wasn't interested. "These coins are going to be the best thing that ever happened to us, or maybe the worst," Corliss says Anderson told him. "We can't tell yet. But if you got a million dollars you'd just piss it away. I'm going to keep the coins for ten years. Mter that, nobody will know where they came from." Corliss says that Anderson planned to "discover" the coins on his own property in Hailey in the year 2006-that he was even going to tear up his back yard with a backhoe to lend the tale verisimilitude. Anderson calls this account "complete bullshit." When the coins were found and An- derson wrote down the combination to his safe, Corliss had thrown away the slip of paper. He didn't want to be tempted to sneak into Anderson's garage, because he was afraid that Anderson would catch him trespassing and shoot him with his deer rifle. Or his shotgun. Or one of his handguns. Now Emily was insisting that Greg get his gold back. But Corliss says that he had become even warier of his boss after the two of them spent a tense afternoon skiing with some of Corliss's familr Eying Corliss's sister-in-law from Palm Springs, Anderson had muttered, "That bitch ought to be careful: some- body might bite her ears and fingers off to get those diamonds." (Anderson says he didn't make the remark.) Early on March 29, 1997, a Saturda Corliss went over to Anderson's house with thirteen thousand dollars in cash that he'd borrowed from his older brother to cover all his loans. He carried the money in a fishing hat-"like an of-